About a year ago, I started publishing a monthly tabloid size newspaper that covers all the arts-entertainment-fun stuff in certain part of a rural Midwest state. It covers 10 counties and is a free distribution of about 10,000 copies per month.

Our publication is full color offers advertising about 1/3 of the price of our competition’s b/w rates. The paper is fantastic and we hear rave reviews from all the people that pick it up. It is distributed in about 100+ locations.

In a small population rural area of the Midwest, our ad prices are very affordable ($220’ish for 1/4 page), but for the ma and pa stores that are around here, they can’t spend that kind of money. Would I be further ahead to do something that is like a $30 business card ad with black ink on colored 11 x 17 copy paper with arts, entertainment, etc. and make $900 per town, per month (or bi-monthly) and do it in 10-15 area towns? This would eliminate the need for full color printing ($1,500+ monthly) and we could just utilize the copier in house to do it for much less.

Or, would I be better to continue to keep offering what we are doing now, but just keep working on the sales and be happy with the sales that we are currently getting or get in the future from the bigger companies?

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Jay’s Answer:

Another idea: educate the potential advertisers. Create a study of your existing advertisers. Ask them to do ad tracking for you (track the number of calls + in store visits that are a result of the ad). You may need to give your existing advertisers an incentive to do this work for you.

The result is that you will be able to say: For an ad of this size, this type of store generated N traffic.

When selling ad space to mom-and-pops, you’ll be able to ask them to multiply "N" by the average sale they make, and it should become an issue of ROI, not emotion.